Looking for a Russian Doll?

Just came back not long ago from watching Russian Dolls. It's supposedly the sequel to Spanish Apartment but not entirely. You could watch one without the other and so, it's not a normal sequel.

These two movies are not the type of movies that make you go "Wowee Zowee!" They don't make you go "Wah piang eh, si beh steady!". They just make you go "Hmmm..." and perhaps a little smile breaks out in your heart that gets translated along the way and ends up appearing as a grin on your face.

Spanish Apartment was when Xaiver was a freshman from France studying in Barcelona. Russian Dolls is about Xaiver as a 30 year old singleman from this world on the cusp of becoming himself. <Publish Post- that was pure gibberish. but it makes sense to me and that's what really matters, actually. It moves like an mtv but still this french gem really develops the characters inside within the 2 hours. Seeing life through the eyes of a 30 year old, just about to find the love of his life and asking all the questions that haunt the modern male, "Is she the one?", "Is the next one coming along going to be better?", "Is this the one true love I have been waiting all my life?", "What is love?".... and along the way, in order to find the answers to these questions, you fuck alot of girls, you think they are the best thing, until the next best thing. The movie mentioned Harold Pinter whom Wendy (Xaiver's love interest) was making reference to when they were trying to write a love story together. In particular, she was talking about Harold's Betrayal which was made into a film. I really want to get my hands on that one. If you thought the chronolgical style in which Irreversible and Memento was cool, well, it's not exactly pioneering work you know? Harold is of course the recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature and famous for being very political these days. British and avery much against the whole messy affair in the middle east. He is famous, as a playwright, for inventing what is the "Pinter pause". And how the love develops between Wendy and Xaiver resembles a Pinteresque play as well:

A Pinter play confronts us as dispassionately as the mask of Greek drama. The enigmatic expression is neither sad nor cheerful, because it is both. Once the text is heard against it, it becomes tragic or comic by turns. Play and mask have an apparent calm that hides a turbulent and passionate emotional life which may erupt at any moment. What is hidden is felt by the audience, even though it may never be revealed. It remains one of the particular miracles of live theatre that this instinctive communication is always present. An audience can therefore sense what an actor is feeling, without the actor having to show that feeling. But the inner feeling must be specific and true. He must experience it, even though it does not need to be stated or revealed. Paradoxically, the mask does not hide, it exposes. So does the play.

There was a really nice scene that was overlaid with Beth Gibbons' song Mysteries in it. Though the lyrics, I thought, weren't exactly appropriate but the mood that the song conveyed certainly was.

Mysteries
God knows how I adore life
When the wind turns on the shores lies another day
I cannot ask for more

When the time bell blows my heart
And I have scored a better day
Well nobody made this war of mine

And the moments that I enjoy
A place of love and mystery
I'll be there anytime

Oh mysteries of love
Where war is no more
I'll be there anytime

When the time bell blows my heart
And I have scored a better day
Well nobody made this war of mine

And the moments that I enjoy
A place of love and mystery
I'll be there anytime

Mysteries of love
Where war is no more
I'll be there anytime

~Beth Gibbons and Rustin' Man